(Project of the Historical Materialism Series at Brill)

Vpered Publications – Вперед (сборник) – №3 – Май 1911

The final collection – final in this iteration (and this membership minus Pokrovskii) – came out in May of 1911. The editorial addresses the most recent events in Russia as exemplifying Vpered‘s constant insistence that the revolutionary situation in Russia has remained as vital as before, even if its intensity is not (yet) that of 1905-1907 period.

The issue does not have any texts by Bogdanov – the second issue’s ‘discussion’ regarding proletarian culture caused a considerable amount of consternation in the group (although it is not entirely clear what caused such an offense as Bogdanov’s views were well-known, even if not fully elaborated) – but has, again, two texts from Lunacharsky (as Voinov on Tolstoy and as himself on the international situation), a piece on student movement from Stanislav Volsky (and later another piece from him on ‘petitions’ movement), a discussion of participation in the congress of factory doctors by Fedor Kalinin, and a large engagement with the ‘agrarian question’ from Aleksinskii.

A ‘discussion’ section has a short text against Plekhanov and a mildly mocking text against Lenin and his legal newspaper Zvezda [Star]. A third piece is an engagement with Trotsky’s programmatic ‘manifesto’ called ‘The Situation in the Country and Our Goals’ (you can read it here).

The final page of the collection has two important pieces of information – first is a comment regarding ‘recallism’ that Lenin will pick up and constantly cite in his arguments against Vpered, second is a small announcement:

1) The editorial board of Vpered, according to Lenin’s later argument, openly admits that ‘recallism’ is a ‘fully legitimate current in our Party’ – a scandalous admission for Lenin, but not for Vpered group that, while not claiming to consists entirely from ‘recallists’ saw nothing wrong with that particular view. For Lenin, on the other hand, it was a violation of the agreement between various factions at January 1910 Central Committee Plenum – most of his attacks on ‘liquidators’ and ‘recallists’ in 1910 to 1912 contains a version of this argument.

2) ‘Comrade Domov’ – Mikhail Pokrovskii – informs the readers that he is no longer involved with Vpered‘s publications. It is said that Pokrovskii took particular offense at Bogdanov’s ‘proletarian culture’ agenda and did not want to continue as a member of Vpered.

The fourth collection was in works but due to growing disagreements between the members of Vpered it was never published.